


into the breach

by amb-roses (overtture)



Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Light Angst, Light Horror, Mild Blood, No Dialogue, Other, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-09-30 17:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20450885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/overtture/pseuds/amb-roses
Summary: Once, Roman would’ve called him a doomsday; something dangerous and beautiful, swift and unyielding, devastating and world-ending. Havoc, so powerful, so concentrated, so focused it destroys everything in its path.He knows better now. He knowsDeanbetter now.





	into the breach

**Author's Note:**

> this was a hundred word drabble i started for the heist au before it got scrapped, more of a character study if anything! i honestly finished this months ago but took forever to look it over and pick out what i didn't like, another month before i drafted it on here, so! enjoy this little drabble! as usual, will edit it over later
> 
> end poem is into the breach by ocean vuong's night sky with exit wounds

It's something Roman notices a few weeks into training with him. They've started sharing hotel rooms together, something about funds and team bonding, and each and every morning, Dean wakes up and Roman occasionally takes a minute to just listen.

Without fail, Dean wakes up, rolls off his side and onto his back, pushes his arms beneath himself with a long, growling groan. Sometimes it’s a rough, aching thing Roman can feel resonate in his own bones and relate, sometimes something quieter, something more internal. He could never place why that sound struck a chord until the whole picture of _ Dean Ambrose _pieced together in his mind’s eye.

Dean sounds old. Old in a way he can’t really place, something old in such a young body.

His voice is almost broken, rough and abused, worn and torn by stories and history he isn't privy to, more chest than vocal cords, more human than the silver tongues of their industry. When he groans and grumbles he sounds like upset, upturned gravel, like shards of metal and flint are packed into his chest. He sounds like the crunch of broken glass.

Each pop of his joints, each murmur of irritation as he shifted in a chair, in his bed, on the couch, like an old abandoned building. Shifting and groaning, getting comfortable as it holds up against the tests of time. Like a settling foundation that still, somehow, stands against the elements. He imagines a post-apocalypse world, silent, sleeping, thin claws of fog rolling through streets, low tides of heavy clouds rolling in, long rotted, broken concrete buildings, glimmering in the low light with the remnants of broken, dead, sleeping life.

Once, Roman would’ve called him a doomsday; something dangerous and beautiful, swift and unyielding, something devastating and world-ending, havoc, so powerful, so concentrated, so focused it destroys everything in its path. 

Chaos, blood and ruin, the end of all things on his heels, in the flick of his wrists and rolls of his shoulders, steely eyes and carefully controlled, measured movements. Direct and directed. He could see it in the way spotlight and stagelight alike seemed to wake him up, bare his teeth and force something forward and out of him from deep within, deep, deep, deeper still in that terrifying place where the dark seemed to convulse with something of a heartbeat, where there should be none. Somewhere deep, where light dared to taunt and test the line it couldn’t cross, where the oceanic trenches seemed to swallow it whole. 

Somewhere light couldn’t reach.

It’s a rare occurrence but Roman, very early in the morning, sometimes sees Dean sitting up in bed. Standing, once or twice. Sometimes… sometimes, something in his mind pauses, pauses and realizes that something is very wrong with the man on the other side of the room. He’d read about it once, something about that survival part of your brain. Instincts and stuff. Dean is Dean, though, and Roman can’t quite make out why his body is tensing, muscle by muscle, until he leans just so and catches the look on his brother’s face.

Roman tries very, very hard to forget that expression, and the few times he does, his nightmares pull it from storage to remind him of what pure, human fear feels like.

In the same breath, though, he sees the very same way those spotlights and stagelights leave him and like a man possessed, seemed to collapse on himself, the fight leaving him with a heavy breath. The way he slumps over, a marionette with its strings cut. The way the waters become still, choppy, familiar. He knows this man, this human before him.

Roman would’ve called him a dead man walking, but dead men don’t get a spark to their eyes like that when they watch wrestling. But he’s close, he thinks sometimes. Dean’s got something to lose, he has _ something _, and that makes him not nothing, even when his teeth are wet with blood and foreign sweat and the taste of another’s flesh, and his eyes seem too blank, too gone to be lifeful.

Even when Roman thinks he can visualize those cracks over his skin, broken up by faint, faint scarring, when he squints and tilts his head a little. Even when he lets the lights glare catch his eyes at just the right angle, when he can see the bloodied mess right where Dean’s heart is, because it _ is _ there. Something monstrous and horrifyingly human, but _ there. _ Even if Dean doesn’t know it’s still sluggishly pumping away.

He knows Dean isn’t a dead man walking, because he can hear his moaning and groaning at night as he rolls over onto his other side. Because he sees the way his eyes don’t quite light up, no, but gleam. The way his shoulders hitch, the way his mouth twitches in that way he knows he’s about to say something. The way he pinches Roman’s sleeves and tugs when he’s wearing a longer sleeved shirt, trying to get his attention without startling him because Dean is surprisingly sneaky when he isn’t quirking or speaking, silent as a ghost and twice as easy to see through.

He knows Dean isn’t a dead man walking, because he smiles so passionately, barks out laughter like its so big he can’t quite keep it in, stretches as fast as he can before matches just so he can get into the ring that much faster, a passionate, simple glee powering him through any aches and pains. He knows Dean isn’t because of the way his voice croaks with use, the way _ I just got off the phone with Renee _ sounds so much like _ I love her, I don’t know if I’ll ever stop, when I started, I love her more than anything, my love, my life, my partner, my everything. _

The way his arms around them are like promises, everything he can’t quite say transmitted, translated through touches, an ebb and flow, give and take he can’t quite understand completely, not as much as Dean seems to live and breathe it. The way he seems so far away, a different being, just a step away from them and a step closer towards something _ else, _but always waits for them to catch up and slows himself down for them without complaint or irritation.

As the years trickle away, through their fingers, out of them, left behind, he recognises Dean Ambrose is not a doomsday, no, just the apocalypse trailing it. His body is a cycle of growth, creation, decay, destruction, his presence a gun in two parts; the load of doomsday into the chamber and the pull of the apocalypse in his trigger. 

He’s a greedy thing, like most wrestlers are, but he _ takes _from others, takes and swallows and brings forth the best and worst of the depths of other people. He takes them and carves himself into them, rips into their hearts, their souls, to make a place for himself. Infests and infects, takes and takes and only has himself, the horrible truth of Dean Ambrose to fill the void he leaves.

And then he smiles. Genuine, as real and innocent as he could be, which was a surprising amount past all the bared teeth and white-knuckled fists.

And now, their history staining his soul, his name, _ him _ , coloring his back like bruises, a warning sign in bright neon, there is no leaving him. Roman Reigns and the apocalypse. And it was _ affectionate. _A death warrant, maybe, but he was its and it was his. 

Dean Ambrose had dug his roots deep, deep, deeper into the soil of Roman Reigns, into the tightly locked depths he never dared to air, and bound them together. Maybe it had always been that way.

Not like there was any other option he would choose anyway, he thinks as he accepts a scarlet splattered hand up, smiling a soft, bloody smile back.

**Author's Note:**

> it's simple: i just don’t know  
how to love a man  
gently. tenderness  
a thing to be beaten  
into. fireflies strung  
through sapphired air.  
you’re so quiet you’re almost  
tomorrow.  
the body was made soft  
to keep us  
from loneliness.  
you said that  
as if the car were filling  
with river water.  
don’t worry.  
there’s no water.  
only your eyes  
closing.


End file.
